16. Ezra
Ezra
16
My fingers strum against the strings, and just as I step up to the microphone, Dylan and Rock finally decide to grace us with their presence, still wearing yesterday’s clothes of course.
“Where the fuck have you been?” I demand, hating how fucking jealous I’ve been of their wild night. The videos of Dylan’s bare ass running up and down the street have more than made the rounds, but the fact that I could make out Rae in the background, laughing in a way she used to, makes everything clench inside my gut. I fucking miss hearing that laugh so goddamn much. “If I can make it here on time, then so the fuck should you.”
Dylan rubs his temples, clearly trying to zone me out. “Why so loud?” he whines. “We’re only twenty minutes late. Besides, you live here. If you couldn’t get here on time, I’d be concerned.”
“Twenty minutes is still twenty minutes,” I argue, knowing damn well that I’ve been way more than twenty minutes late in the past and nobody has ever blinked an eye, but suddenly Rae is involved, and I can’t manage to get a grip on my emotions.
“Chill out,” Rock says. “We were celebrating Rae’s birthday, and besides, she needed it. We weren’t stopping until she passed out cold.”
I let out a heavy sigh. “And did she?”
Dylan laughs. “Oh yeah. It’ll be a miracle if she drags her ass in here today.”
My brow arches. “So, I take it she accepted the job?”
“She didn’t just accept it,” Rock says with a smirk as he throws his hoodie down and climbs up the stage, making his way to his drums. “She put Lenny through his paces. Negotiated a deal better than any of us would have been able to get while also managing to stick it to your stupid ass at the same time.”
“Huh?”
Dylan and Rock share a glance, and I hate that I’m not already in on whatever inside joke they have. “She requested particular luxuries during the tour, negotiated her pay, and insisted that all meals be included, which should all come out of your cut.”
I stare at Dylan. Surely he’s lying. She didn’t do that. Everything I have is all for her anyway, and I would have done it without asking, but her boldness has me stumped. This was supposed to be a way to get back at me, not that I don’t deserve it, but it’s clear that she intends to make this tour as painful for me as possible. She wants to hurt me like I hurt her. She wants me to feel her pain, and I’ll take it any day of the week.
As if on cue, Raleigh strides into the studio, and just like yesterday, everything stops.
She’s so fucking beautiful. The last time I saw her in the flesh was Axel’s funeral, and before that, she was sixteen years old. Now, at twenty-four, she’s more radiant than ever. She keeps her gaze down, refusing to meet my stare, because she knows exactly what she’ll find there, but even with her head down, there’s no mistaking her sharper features. Her carefree youthful face is gone, replaced by the features of a grown woman, and damn, it fucking suits her.
Don’t get me wrong, I more than noticed yesterday, but I was too busy reeling in the shock of seeing her again that I didn’t get a chance to truly take her in, but now, just like that very first day, she holds every ounce of my attention.
Rock makes a low whistle as Rae walks across the studio. “Well hey there, gorgeous,” he says in a stupid tone that only the people close enough would recognize as teasing. “Not gonna lie, I’m not used to seeing the woman I spent the night with the next morning.”
Fuck. I could kill him.
Rae continues walking, not skipping a beat, and sure as fuck not lifting her gaze toward us. “You fucking wish, Rock,” she says, holding her hand up and giving him the bird. “Keep your manwhore tendencies to yourself.”
Rock laughs as Dylan steps in beside me. “Don’t stress, man,” he says, keeping his tone low so that Rae doesn’t hear him across the studio. “He’s just fucking with her. Nothing happened.”
“Yeah, no shit,” I say, knowing both Rock and Rae well enough to know they would never cross that line, doesn’t grate on my nerves any less though.
“As for her friend,” Dylan says with a cringe. “I don’t think I can say the same. I think I fucked her, but I can’t be sure. I was so fucking drunk I don’t even remember going to bed. All I know is that I woke up in Rae’s hotel room next to her friend and the word ‘MINE’ was written across my chest in black Sharpie.”
My head whips toward him. “What?”
He shrugs his shoulders as if having no idea himself, but grips the bottom of his shirt and tears it up, showing me the faded word where he’s clearly spent ages trying to scrub it off. “I don’t fucking know, man.”
I let out a breath, my cheeks blowing out. “She’s gonna kill you.”
“Shit.”
Rae slows her pace, her brows furrowed as she reaches for her phone, and I watch as she swipes her thumb across the screen. Her gaze narrows, and in an instant, her slow pace comes to a dead stop as she looks over something—a text, maybe.
Her head snaps up, her feral stare locking onto Dylan’s.
“YOU DIDN’T!”
“Oh fuck,” he mutters beside me.
“Run,” I say, knowing that look all too well. “Fucking run, bro.”
Dylan shoves his guitar at me, and I barely manage to catch it before he takes off at a sprint. “I’m sorry,” he throws over his shoulder as Rae bolts after him.
His killer hangover slows him down, and in seconds, she has him pinned on the couch, sitting on his chest, and using her thighs to keep his arms locked at his side. “How many times . . .” she says, grabbing a cushion and whacking him with it. “Do I have to tell you,” whack, “that my friends are off limits?” She thumps him again before shoving the cushion against his face and trying to suffocate him. “I swear, you assholes never fucking change.”
Rock laughs as Jett watches, clearly having no idea what’s going on, but all I feel is intense jealousy. I’d give anything to have that carefree nature with Rae again. It used to be me she tried to suffocate with cushions, but that was another life, one so far away that I don’t think I can ever get back.
Remembering that Rae is tiny, Dylan grabs her, and in the space of a second, he has her pinned on the couch. “Don’t make me fart on you, Raleigh Stone,” Dylan warns.
“You wouldn’t,” she shrieks.
“I thought last night would have been a clear indicator that I never matured anywhere past the age of nineteen,” Dylan says, and honestly, I’ve never heard a truer statement come from his mouth. “You know damn well that I’ll do it.”
“Okay, fine,” she says. “Let me up.”
Dylan relents and allows her the chance to get up, and when they’re both back on their feet, she meets his stare. “I hate you.”
“You love me,” he says, hooking his arm over her shoulder and yanking her into his side. “How are you feeling this morning? Bet you’re regretting that last shot of tequila right about now.”
Rae scoffs. “I’m regretting the last five shots of tequila.”
A throat clears across the room, and I glance toward the door to see Lenny and Marley making their way into the studio. “Are we spending the day fucking around or are we actually going to do some work today?” Lenny demands. “Last day of rehearsals before we jet off to Europe, and I need to know that you all have this shit down.”
“We’ve had it down since we were sixteen,” Rock says.
Lenny shakes his head, clearly not in the mood this morning, and he focuses his attention on Rae. “Raleigh, you’re with me,” he snaps before striding into the attached office with Marley hastily chasing behind.
Rae glances at Dylan and gives him a knowing look. “Showtime.”
“You’re gonna kill it,” he tells her, and with that, Rae traipses after Lenny, walking into the office and closing the door behind her.
“Woah,” Jett says, gaping after her. “Who the fuck was that? Is she the new marketing chick?”
“Sure is,” Rock says proudly.
Jett whistles low in appreciation. “Fuck me. I call dibs. Bet I can have her bent over that desk by the end of the day,” he says with a cocky laugh that has my teeth grinding. “She looks like a wild one. Bet she’s a screamer.”
Fucking silence.
Eyes become shifty. Dylan looks at me. I look at Rock. They look at each other and back to me again. Dylan subtly shakes his head, warning me not to do anything, but Rock is nodding, warning me that if I don’t put this fucker in his place now, then he will. And while I was happy to let it slide yesterday, today he’s taken it way too far.
As if knowing he’s lost this one, Dylan sighs and makes his way back toward the stage as I turn toward Jett and put Dylan’s guitar down. I take two purposeful strides toward him, and just as his brows furrow, I grip his shoulder with one hand and use the other to sucker punch him right in the gut.
He goes down like a sack of shit. “What the fuck was that for?” Jett roars, clutching his stomach in agony.
“Do you have any idea who the fuck that was?” I demand as his eyes water with pain, looking up at me from the ground. He shakes his head, and I don’t waste a second filling him in. “Raleigh Stone. Axel’s little sister, and the woman that every fucking song I’ve ever written has been about, so watch your fucking mouth when you speak about her.”
His eyes widen, realizing the severity of the situation. He didn’t just fuck up. He almost ended his career before it even began.
“Fuck, man,” he grunts, still clutching his stomach as he tries to get back to his feet. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“Let me make myself clear,” I growl, not giving a shit that Rae could turn around at any moment and see exactly what’s going on out here. “You don’t touch her. You don’t breathe near her. You don’t even fucking talk to her unless she talks to your first. Raleigh is mine. Always has been.”
He visibly swallows and quickly nods as real fear flashes in his eyes. “Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t serious. I was just . . . I wasn’t going to touch her.”
I hold his stare for a long moment before finally turning away, more than ready to get this rehearsal underway. There’s a lot to go through today. The dancers should be here in the next hour with the pyrotechnics team to confirm the final arrangements, the wardrobe team will want final confirmations as well as the sound and lighting team, despite all of this having been sorted out weeks ago.
Grabbing the neck of my guitar, I settle in front of the microphone. “Let’s take it from the very beginning,” I tell the guys, knowing they have the set list memorized, and with that, Rock counts us in.
The moment we start playing, Marley excuses herself from the office, leaving Lenny and Rae to talk, and as I sing the very words I wrote for her, I watch their conversation quickly morph into a heated argument, but from where I’m standing, it looks as though Rae is the one with the upper hand.
Hands fly while Lenny paces back and forth, and when Rae turns around in anger and goes to storm for the door, Lenny dives after her, begging her to come back. I watch as Rae lets out a heavy sigh and clearly accepts whatever Lenny is saying, but the subtle smirk on her lips tells me she just played him and got whatever it is she was hoping for.
They talk for another twenty minutes before Lenny strides out of the office, leaving Rae to do whatever it is she needs to do, and as I continue playing, I watch her stride around my office, making the desk her own. From her new position at the desk, she now has the perfect view of the studio, and I know without a doubt, it’s her stubborn nature that has her refusing to look up.
Marley comes back in a moment later, holding a brand-new laptop still in its box and delivers it to Rae, who doesn’t waste a moment diving in and getting herself set up. As she works, I can’t help but be thrown back in time to the days we would practice while she worked on her laptop, doing homework, putting together the flyers for our gigs, and pushing us on every social media account she created for the band—accounts we still use to this day. Only now we have a whole team responsible for posting, and we don’t have to lift a finger.
The day quickly begins to pass with Rae lost in her work as we perfect our sets. When the dancers show up, she barely even notices, even after catching them all over me yesterday. Before Rae stormed through here, I was more than happy to allow Stacey and Jessica to distract me with their bodies and provocative dance moves, but today, I couldn’t care less.
As we take a break, I jump down from the stage and walk across the studio to get a drink, and with every step I take, I feel Rae’s stare tracking me. I almost want to look up, just to catch her in the act, but I won’t dare. Being here in my space is just as hard for her as it is for me. This isn’t just my studio, it’s my home, and there was a time I thought that it would someday be ours, that we would raise a family here.
After taking a drink, I glance up to notice Dylan has followed me, and after grabbing a drink for himself, he steps in beside me and nods toward Rae. “You think she’s okay in there?”
“Yeah,” I say as a small smile pulls at the corners of my lips. “Look at her. We should have brought her on the second she graduated college. She’s in her element. She hasn’t stopped all morning. Not to mention, you saw the way she played Lenny. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who’s ever been able to do that apart from Axel.”
“Yeah, kinda badass,” he says. “But you know she never graduated, right? She was talking about it last night after the whole naked street run. She said that after the funeral, she spiraled, kinda the same way we all did, but she couldn’t pull herself out of the darkness and everything just . . . sucked for her. She never completed her degree, never got to graduate, and eventually moved back home to Michigan.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. Wasn’t all she said last night though,” he says with a sharp edge in his tone.
“What are you talking about?” I ask, watching one of the label’s assistants pause at the door of Rae’s new temporary office, knocks, and then walks in with lunch. Rae thanks him, and as he walks back out, he pulls against the door to close it, only it doesn’t quite seal.
“She hasn’t heard any of our newer music,” he tells me, his gaze locked on the cracked door just as mine swivels around to meet his stare.
“The fuck?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” he tells me. “She’s avoided every album since the first tour. She doesn’t even know the titles.”
I shake my head, unable to process what the hell he’s trying to tell me. “But all those songs, I wrote them for her—”
“Yeah, she’s never heard them,” he confirms as my head spins.
There’s no fucking way.
She used to lay on her bed reading while I wrote. My lyrics were so entwined with her, they could have easily come from her brain instead of mine, and to know she hasn’t even heard these songs that have been out for years is almost absurd.
A wave of anger takes over me, and for a moment, I consider storming in there and demanding answers, but it quickly morphs into a strange mix of sadness and regret. All those years, knowing I couldn’t reach out to her, I thought I could communicate through my lyrics. I would imagine her begging Axel for early copies of our new albums and sitting in her bed pouring over the lyrics, knowing that I was speaking directly to her. But to know she never even attempted to hear them guts me in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
“Come on,” I say. “We’ve got shit to do.”
Dylan and I make our way back to the stage, and as I reach for my guitar and hook the strap over my shoulder, I look to Rock. “We’re doing ‘Cold Hearted Bitch.’ ”
“Huh?” he says as he reaches for his drumsticks. “That’s not on the setlist.”
“Oh, he knows,” Dylan mumbles under his breath.
“Fuck,” Rock grunts, the two guys knowing clear as day that this is a message for Rae. If she thinks she can get through this without hearing our songs and taking in the lyrics I slaved over for her, she’s got another thing coming.
Keeping my gaze locked on Rae through the office window, I prepare myself for the start of the song. Rock slams against the drums for the killer intro of “Cold Hearted Bitch” and Rae jumps in surprise, her head snapping up as the crack in the door makes her little soundproof office not so peaceful anymore.
She stands, probably to close the door properly, but as she crosses the office and reaches for the door, the lyrics come in, and I sing them with every raw, pain-filled emotion coursing through my veins.
Her gaze snaps to mine, and I don’t dare look away as she becomes my captive, mesmerized by my words, my voice, or maybe it’s the raw anger in my tone. I don’t know what’s drawing her in, but for as long as I have her attention, I’ll continue to sing.
This song was written at a low point in my life. I was missing her, and after realizing the wedge I’d forced between us was destroying both of us, I was angry. Hell, I’ve been angry for a long fucking time, and after hearing from Ax that she didn’t want anything to do with me, I took my pen and wrote down the ugliness of the excruciating emotions that plagued me.
She didn’t deserve this song, and after it had already been recorded and released, I’d started to regret ever writing it. But right now, I can’t help but feel that same hurt. Feel the agony of the realization that she’s no longer mine and hasn’t been for years.
That girl who laid across her bed and stared over my shoulder as I wrote down every last emotion that coursed through my body no longer exists. I broke her. I made her cold and closed off, and in leaving her behind, in abandoning her back in Michigan, I abandoned myself.
As the words flow out of me, Rae continues to watch, and as a single tear rolls down her cheek, my anger only deepens, but not because of her. Because of me. I had this chance to do something real, to dive deep and sing something that actually holds weight, something that has the power to heal both of us, and instead, I chose to be a fucking petty, butthurt asshole.
Great move on my part.
The song comes to an end, and as the boys start moving around and putting their guitars down, Rae and I remain locked in position, her gaze singeing me from the inside out. A million messages pass between us as that old connection flickers back to life, only it’s not the same.
We always had a connection, an invisible string that tied us together, and whenever she was in the room, I felt it pulse to life, glowing the most radiant golden hues. Even a million miles apart, it was still there, lying dormant, waiting for her to bring it back to life. Even after all these years, it was never severed, but now, it no longer pulses with golden light and love. It’s cold and hard, flickering with profound darkness, and it fucking kills me.
The heaviness of her pain weighs down on me, and giving her just a fraction of respite, I finally lower my gaze, releasing her from my hold. She doesn’t skip a beat, grabbing her new laptop and taking off, and all I can do is watch as the other half of my soul turns her back and walks away.